I TAKE THE train back from Brighton, and I meet Kitty in a pub in the ‘Gatwick Village’, for the flight home. The place is unnerving, all the usual slop of pint glasses and ashtrays, but on miniature tables to allow room for the trolleys and backpacks and bags; men falling asleep over their beers, unshaven and sad. The pub itself just a pretence of a pub, a painted corner of the concourse, a differently coloured floor. There are no doors. I pick my way through the filth of baggage and delayed lives to find Kitty-a woman weirdly like my little sister, though much too old.
When I reach the table, I look down at the empty glasses in front of her and I ask, ‘Are they all yours?’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ she says.
‘Just asking.’
‘Two of them are mine, the rest aren’t mine. OK?’
‘Do you want another one?’
‘Yes thank you, I would love another one.’
I turn to wade back towards the bar, and hear her say, ‘Bunny,’ which is the name she had for me when she was a child. I turn back to embrace her, my back twisted, my torso held away, as she half-rises to receive the hug, her thighs trapped under the little table of wood. Her hair feels fake, like a wig, but I think it is just crisping up under the dye and Frizz-Ease. From a distance, it was just as curly and beautiful and black as it ever was, though when I check her face I see that it has collapsed, quite fundamentally, and all the distraction of blue eyes, and mischievous cheeks, and winning smile-the whole Celtic chipmunk-has melted as easy as wax, leaving the flesh hanging on to bones, bones, bones.
‘How are you?’ I say.
‘How am I?’
‘Yes. How are you?’
‘Fine. I’m fine.’
‘What is it, anyway?’ I say.
‘It’s a G and T, thanks.’
‘Yes, I thought it was.’
‘Yes.’
It is many years, I think, since I have ordered a drink at a bar. The barman ignores me for the longest time. I feel like shouting at him that I am quite grown up and want to give him some money now. I want to say, ‘My brother is dead! Serve me immediately!’ but then, so what? Some people haven’t seen their brothers in twenty years.
I get Kitty’s gin and one for myself.
‘English measures,’ she says, holding the glass up and waggling it, like I am such a fool.
Kitty always goes on about being hit as a child, though the fact is that she was a complete brat: she always came back for more, and she often got it; not just from me and Liam, who actually liked her, but also from Mossie-the-psychotic, who taunted and enraged her into a total Shirley Temple. There was something transcendental about her rage at six or seven, her body rigid and her temper whizzing around the room, until she caught it, somehow, and stuffed it back into herself. After which, she exploded into a fire-breathing fluff-pot, a cartoon little sister; fists yammering against Mossie’s chest. Which was just asking for trouble, because you shouldn’t take things too far with Mossie. At least with myself and Liam, we only did it to tease.
And of course I feel guilty, when I think of it now, and I don’t believe in hitting anybody, at all, ever, but I still find a twitch of something more than amusement when she is being a prissy little bitch like this. The toss of the head, some small superiority, it makes me wish she was six all over again.
I lift my glass to her, ever so slightly, and say, ‘Cheers.’
She starts to cry as soon as we are on the plane; she weeps the whole way home. Pints of it. She moves from quiet leakage to sighs, heaves and judders, and then back again. It sounds to me like she is practising crying as much as actually doing it. I look out the window, while the air hostess kindly offers a brandy in her coffee and then charges five pounds sterling for it.
‘Are you all right? Are you sure now?’
The man on the other side of her knows that someone has died. He wonders am I a social worker, or perhaps even a prison officer, and why am I not holding her hand. And I too wonder why I am not holding her hand, as I look down on the distant skin of the Irish sea. ‘We slept in the same room for twenty years,’ I want to tell him. ‘Isn’t that enough for you, isn’t it already above and beyond?’
Liam, meanwhile, is sitting one row up across the aisle. There is a slumbrous menace about his ghost that makes me realise how indifferent he was when he finally walked away from us all into the sea. I can feel his gaze on the skin of my cheek as he turns to look at me, uncanny and dead. I know what it is saying.
The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.
I look up too quickly, and he is gone.
There is a big white house on Lambay Island-Georgian, at a guess, and worth gazillions. I saw it first, it must have been, from the beach, the day we went with Ada to visit our mad Uncle Brendan. And it suddenly kicks into me, this fact of Ada’s son lost to Largactyl and squalor. How many years of it? He probably died wondering who he actually was.
I search up the coastline for a beach, a bridge, an estuary, back again to a headland-and there it is: a pencil of a round tower, a fat vase of a water tower and, beside that again, a group of buildings surrounded by trees. I have just caught sight of it when I have lost it again, the plane banks and grabs a view of sky.
‘What happened to Uncle Brendan?’ I shout at Kitty, over the noise.
‘What happened to Uncle Brendan?’
‘Yes, Uncle Brendan.’
‘What do you want to know about Uncle Brendan for?’
The plane opens its underbelly and we wait for the wheels to lock. Getting its little leggies straight, digging down its heels.
‘He died,’ says Kitty, relenting.
‘Did he?’
‘I quite liked him.’
‘Did you?’
I was sure I had never met him, though now here he is, suddenly at the Christmas table in Griffith Way, a face made fantastic by falling jowls, his nostrils rimmed red and his eyes-his eyes when I think of them were tired and unpleasant, as though madness was a tedious business; nearly as tedious as Christmas. My memory puts him in an orange paper hat, with a glass of brandy in his shaking hand, but there was no alcohol in our house until Liam started smuggling it in, and there were no paper hats either.
Brendan is where we got our eyes from: Spillane eyes that met my father’s Atlantic blue to give us our undiluted, alcoholic’s eyes, of straight-no-chaser blue; beautiful and pathological and somehow absent, or absent-minded, until we ‘turn them on’, which is to say we notice someone and decide to give them the full blue.
(My own eyes are like Ada’s, a sort of nothing grey they call ‘liath’ in Irish when they write about stone walls or the sea. Alice got these rainy eyes too, as did Ivor and Midge. We were not true, electric Hegartys, but a sort of subspecies; the Firbolg of Griffith Way.)
Uncle Brendan is also where we got our mathematical streak-this, in fact, a fairly prosaic facility to do with remembering phone numbers and reprimanding girls at supermarket tills for overcharging on the mixed leaves. None of us have what Uncle Brendan had-this much we knew-because Uncle Brendan had Maths. We were always given to understand that our mother’s brother was too good for this world.
And though Ernest reads up his String Theory by candlelight in the mountains of Peru, most of the clever Hegartys are just that-clever, which is to say unredeemed; earning more or less money than the next person and liable to smart remarks. I realise, as we land, that life in St Ita’s was not a romantic one, but more likely a long, dirty business of watching the piss gather in your lap, and nearly knowing what you were thinking, from time to time.
‘I know what I’m thinking!’ says the mad man in my mind, banging the wooden arm of his armchair. ‘I know what I’m thinking!’ and the passing nurse says, ‘Good for you!’
The airport terminal starts to slide past the window and it looks so much like a picture of a building, the whole ritual of landing feels so cinematic and fake, that I don’t believe any of it for a while. Uncle Brendan is not dead now, or not properly dead, and there is something so skittish about the moving walkway, the escalators and the baggage carousels, something that will not adhere yet to Irish soil, that when I finally get the Saab out of the car park and hit the roundabout I turn north instead of south on the airport road.
It is only a few miles away, this place. The little bridge is still there, and the railway line, slicing north. After which, there is a sudden slack in my mental map and the road unravels in front of me. I am just beginning to lose hope when it snaps back into the road that I remember-just the same, long and straight. There is a concrete path along the left-hand side, a line of disastrous trees along the right, beyond them a ditch that gives way to a low-lying field, where a vivid, wet green inclines, here and there, into a pool of water over grass.
Beyond the trees is the raw white light of the sky over water.
This is it. There is no shift between my mind’s eye and my real eye. I try to slow down to the pace of my memory, but it is slipping by me too fast.
‘Do you remember this road?’ I say to Kitty.
‘What road?’
‘This road.’
‘What about it?’
Already she has eaten up half the past. Half my life is gone before she decides to understand.
‘Do I remember it?’ says Kitty.
‘Jesus,’ I say.
‘What?’
By now we are past the bungalow in its field of corn, though it is trimmed to stubble in the low autumn sun.
‘The man with two sticks?’
And here, where she might well bring things to a pitch, Kitty just says, ‘Oh.’
‘Walking along here?’
‘Here?’ says Kitty. ‘No, not here.’
At which moment I come to a halt, and make a right turn into the hospital drive.
It is as though we are driving through a sudden brief mist, on the other side of which is the past. I push along in second gear, leaning over the steering wheel as we pass a terrace of warden’s cottages, the master’s house perhaps, and then the hospital itself, which is built in Victorian red brick, and the size of a small town.
‘Handicap Services,’ says the sign and I think, with relief, that the lunatics have gone now. The lunatics have turned, quite naturally, to dust. People are not mad, any more. The lunatics are just a residue of skin in these rooms; scratched off, or hacked off, or maybe just shed: a million flakes of skin, a softness under the floorboards, a quality of light.
We pass a courtyard with a high chimney and a low boiler house, all in extravagant, industrial red brick. There are curious round windows on the boiler house, with the Star of David dividing the panes.
‘Jesus,’ says Kitty, thinking, as I am thinking for a second, that they are burning mental patients in there, just to keep the hospital radiators hot.
I pause at the handball alley, engine idling, and look at the round tower and the water tower beyond. But it is not possible to pull up the handbrake and get out into the naked air of the asylum, with the casement windows still watching in their rows. I inch towards a bungalow down by the sea, my fat tyres creeping over the gravel, then I do a three-point turn, and leave.
Once we are back out the gate, I scoot the few hundred yards to the sea itself, the public sea, the swimming sea. Salt water always makes me feel so sane; the height of the waves, and the flick of fish, and the huge press of it on the ocean floor all notwithstanding. There is a little housing estate coming down to the shore, a child on a bicycle, blank with curiosity, and, after I turn at the road’s end, a grey wall enclosing a small field. And in that field-it is quite small-is a Celtic cross that says:
I get out of the car to look at it.
1922-1989
IN YOUR CHARITY,
PLEASE PRAY
FOR THE RESIDENTS OF
ST ITA’S HOSPITAL
BURIED IN THIS CEMETERY
MAY THEY REST IN PEACE
Just one cross-quite new-at the end of a little central path. A double row of saplings promise rowan trees to come. There are no markers, no separate graves. I wonder how many people were slung into the dirt of this field and realise, too late, that the place is boiling with corpses, the ground is knit out of their tangled bones.
I look back, helpless, at Kitty in the front seat of the car.
They have me by the thighs. I am gripped at the thighs by whatever feeling this is. A vague wind. It clutches at me, skitters between my clothes and my skin. It lifts every hair. It grazes my lip. And is gone.